Dr. Kong earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biochemistry from Nanjing University in 1987 and 1990, respectively, and he completed his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Virology at the University of Massachusetts in 1996. He received his postdoctoral training in Molecular Immunology at Yale University from 1996-2000, after which he joined the Department of Pathology at Case Western Reserve University as an assistant professor. Dr. Kong is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Pathology and Neurology and Associate Director of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA.

Dr. Kong’s research interests center on prion protein (PrP) and prion diseases as well as gene therapies, including public health risks of animal prions, animal modeling of human prion diseases, skin prions, and novel human prion diseases, early diagnosis of prion diseases, etiology of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), processing of the normal cellular PrP, and gene therapies for cancer, diabetes, and prion and other neurodegenerative diseases. He is on the editorial boards of a few journals, including Frontiers in Neuroscience and Annals of Translational Medicine. He has served on several review panels for grant agencies and private foundations, such as NIH, USDA, Alberta Prion Research Institute (Canada), and Alzheimer’s Association.